A New (Old) Sewing Machine!

I can't believe how long it has been since I wrote anything on this blog! It just seemed like it took too long to properly compose and format an entry that it was taking precious time away from activities such as sewing.

But here I am pining away for *other* people to write about their new sewing machines and projects that I figure *I* should write about my own projects instead! So here's my latest entry: a new (old) sewing and embroidery machine to add to my stable of fine sewing products - a Brother Pacesetter ULT 2001.



This baby is about 10 years old now, but had been used sparingly by its previous owner. Turns out she, like myself, is an avid Pfaff user! (Noting that my Pfaff has some features that are not duplicated or improved upon by this "new" Brother, it will likely remain as my sewing workhorse).

This ULT 2001 is really a fabulous machine - it is one of these 4-figure sewing machines that I just never envisioned shelling out the money for. But I could afford a 3-figure used machine! It is essentially a special-use computer. It does both sewing and embroidery. And having had an older Brother PE 700, I can tell you that the ULT is much faster and less noisy than the PE 700 when it comes to embroidery. It also has a myriad of sewing functions and the ability to create your own stitch patterns.

I haven't used this machine much yet (I just picked it up 4 days ago) and am looking forward to seeing how it shines vs. the Pfaff. I can already tell that there are a few things that I don't like - its regular zig-zag foot does not come with 1/4" and 1/8" seam allowances marked on it like the Pfaff's does. It also doesn't have thread plate markings in inches! (I have a replacement plate already on order that *does* have both inches and centimeters). It does have things like constant-speed sewing (fast, medium, and slow) which I may or may not like. And it has an adjustable pressure presser foot which is a feature I've been looking for.

Why did I buy this machine? It's not clear. As I've mentioned, it was a good deal for what I was getting. Did I have a need for it? No, but as I listened to my gut for a few days before even approaching the seller, I felt that it was important for some reason to-be-determined. I am completely comfortable with this purchase (which is important to me, these days).

So we'll see how it goes! I am happy to have added this machine to my stable of sewing machines!

Finally, A Day of Rest

Finally, I have a day to rest. It's funny how you dream of the many things you'll do when you finally get some time off and when that day finally comes, all you want to do is sit around and read. So much for sewing, fixing your son's Lego Mindstorm NXT brick, cleaning up your kids' stuff from the last day of school (which was more than a month ago), or transferring those movies from tape to DVD. It all seems to be like just more work.

This day of rest comes after three strenuous weeks of taking on the property management of our local storage condo (an 84-unit collection of personally-owned "garages"). Mind you, this is a fabulous thing, the garage-condo idea. Our stuff is safely tucked away in our own personal storage space. It's a much nicer garage than we'd ever have attached to a residence in a traditional urban environment. And we're surrounded by some very interesting and like-minded characters.

The property management thing came as no surprise, ultimately. The storage condo had been managed by a professional Property Manager (and CPA) in Centennial. Really, a bit too far away from the physical property itself. The owners and the existing Association Board were having tremendous difficulty working with this particular individual and, no doubt, he was having difficulty working with us. So when the time came to elect a new Association Board of Directors, my husband jumped right on that bandwagon.

With a new Board came a new approach to property management. We were going to do it ourselves. And the "we" in that statement meant my husband and myself, at least for the time being. Don't get me wrong, my husband never asked me to participate. I sort of took that on myself.

If you look at our combined skill set, we make a great team. My husband is excellent at all sorts of hand-on tasks that I would never be able to tackle myself. He is also fearless at really taking charge of a task or situation, at meeting the fire department at 4 am to answer a fire alarm call, or simply to pursue the answers to questions he's never had to ask before. I am, however, better at working behind the scenes. I can do those mundane tasks such as billing customers, paying bills, and handling the computer side of the "business".

The timing of this transition from a professional Property Manager to self-management was such that we needed to pay delinquent bills, send out our quarter 3 assessments with a Newsletter that needed to be written, assess the overall "situation" that we'd inherited, and bring the Board up to speed on where we were as an organization. It was a tall order to accomplish in a couple of weeks and it didn't come without its stresses, at least for me.

I think that not enough time has passed yet to view the past 3 weeks with objectivity. It was difficult. It was more difficult than I ever expected, especially for what I thought would be a "good team". We discovered that precise communications is important, but difficult to actually achieve. I can only hope that the next time we go through a cycle of assessments and newsletters, we'll have more time to complete all of the requisite tasks.

I also encountered a conundrum for myself that I have yet to resolve. My personal desire is always to give my best effort towards life. I want to write the best software that I can, I want to create the best Newsletter that I can, I want to provide quality service to others. At the same time, I need to have time to nurture myself selfishly, to sew or to read or whatever. And I can actually put a number on these pursuits: 75% of my time should be spent on "giving my best" and 25% on "self-nurturance". But in the past 3 weeks, I have found that "giving my best" required 100% of my time and self-nurturance was set aside. I found that "giving my best" was becoming a resented effort because of how much time it was consuming. But I was also unable to allow myself to spend any time on self-nurturance because I consider "giving my best" more important than "self-nurturance".

I have yet to really "figure this out". I'd like to be able to say that I now know that I'm no less of a good person when I don't give my all. But I can't say that. Shouldn't we all be giving our best to others? How does self-indulgence add value to our existence, our place in the greater human community? How can we say it's okay to pursue things that only benefit ourselves? This is my conundrum.

Well, Windows Wins

Alas but it seems that QuickBooks Pro 2008 for Windows has beaten out QuickBooks Pro 2007 for Mac. As much as I wanted to kick the new PC out of the house, QuickBooks for Windows is a far better product than QuickBooks for the Mac and costs the same amount.

I had high hopes for the Mac version. The Mac version is known to lack many features found in the PC version, such as handling payroll, credit card processing, tracking time, allowing for multiple users, creating accountant review copies, etc. I wasn't planning on using any of these features anyway. I figured that what it lacked in features would certainly be made up in a razzle-dazzle user interface. But alas I was wrong. It's not a bad interface, but it's just not that great either. And here was the clincher - I do need the ability to see and manipulate customer transaction summaries. That one function alone is much easier to do on the PC than on the Mac (if at all). So the PC stays. (And I'll have to say, it didn't shutdown unexpectedly once today).

So now if I could only understand what "debit = left column" and "credit = right column" really means...

Just Say No to Vista

I just have to say this. If you're going to use the Windows Vista operating system (yes, with Service Pack 1), proceed at your own risk.

Having recently purchased a PC (a respectable HP Pavilion from Costco) with the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system, I have found that the system shuts itself down and restarts randomly. This has happened twice in three days - once while we were doing absolutely nothing and once while we were in the middle of modifying an important QuickBooks file! If you peruse the internet for solutions to this evidently wide-spread problem, you will see a number of skeptical responses in the vein of "surely you were doing something wrong when this happened" or "surely you installed something you shouldn't have to cause this to happen" or "surely you caused your computer to overheat to cause this to happen", etc. I have read enough now to understand that this problem is, in my opinion, a problem with the Vista operating system and not a problem with the user. We all hope that the problem has some kind of logical cause and can be fixed by some logical action. I no longer believe that this is so. The problem is likely complex enough that Microsoft cannot really effectively debug or fix it. So we, the lucky end users, are stuck with an unreliable operating system. Lucky us.

All I can say is use a Mac for as many tasks as you can and use the PC only when you have to.

Web Development Learning Process (Part 1)

Wow! Have you ever felt intimidated by acronyms? HTML, XHTML, DHTML, XML, CSS, DOM, PHP... the list goes on and on! How the heck are you ever supposed to make heads or tails of all of this? For the web-site developer wanna-be, the challenge may seem overwhelming.

So I began a quest to educate myself about web-site development. This all started out many months ago with the intriguing idea of writing Google Gadgets. Particularly, I wanted to create a Georeferencing Calculator - a gadget that would convert Latitudes and Longitudes to Earth Centered Earth Fixed (ECEF) coordinates. (Yep, more acronyms). How hard could that be? Well it turns out you need to know XML, HTML, and JavaScript. Oh that sounded bad right from the start. I already knew some HTML, but that was about it. So in time, I actually gave up on this little idea. However, I continued to want to build this little "gadget" but on a web page.

Web Serving on the Mac with Apache

Finally a couple weeks ago, it occurred to me that I could actually serve web pages on my Mac. Macs conveniently come with the Apache web server built in. All I had to do was turn it on by selecting Personal Web Sharing under Sharing in the System Preferences:

With the help of some tutorials (see Apache Web Serving with Jaguar), I managed to figure out where to actually store my .html and .css files so I could view them in a web browser via http://localhost/. In my case (and probably in most cases initially), the default location for storing these files is in /Library/WebServer/Documents.

So now with the ability to write my own web pages and serve them up to myself, I launched into reviewing my HTML skills and taking my web skills to the next level.

Learning CSS

Fortunately, I had purchased a book last year called Creating Web Sites - The Missing Manual (by Matthew Macdonald, 2005). I had read bits and pieces of it before, but really hadn't delved into it much. Lo and behold it has a wonderful review of HTML and an introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) (and an introduction to blogging as well, BTW)!

Okay, get this. The idea behind CSS is to separate the content of a web page from its formatting or style. Styling encompasses such things as text color, background color or image, fonts, line spacings, etc. You can embed the CSS styling instructions within your .html file or you can keep it in a separate .css file. The CSS file can be reused for multiple web pages. It turns out to be an amazing thing! There are some extremely excellent examples of how you can use CSS to completely alter the look of a web page at the CSS Zen Garden web page. (There's an accompanying book, also).

The key to using CSS successfully (IMO) is the use of HTML div tags so that you can break up the content of your web page into blocks. If you assign an id or a class to a particular div (e.g. < class="main_content">), then you can style everything within that block by referencing its class or id.

CSS also provides a nice mechanism for controlling the positions of blocks of HTML content. You can position blocks absolutely, you can control their widths / heights, and you can "float" blocks to the left or right side of the block's container (e.g. the web page). This ability to control the placement of content blocks allows you to format your web page without the use of tables and tables within tables, etc. In fact, when you add images to your blogger postings, you have the option to float your images to the left or right. I've done this in previous posts. Using CSS for controlling layouts is something I have yet to really mastered, but I have had some success.

I also found the book CSS - The Missing Manual (by David McFarland, 2006) to be an excellent means of building on what I had learned in the Creating Web Sites book.

Password Protecting a Web Page

I used my new-found CSS skills to mock up a web site for our local GarageTown HOA. In doing so, I was also presented with the problem of password-protecting one of the web pages. Turns out this was fairly easy with the Apache web server. Here are some basic instructions:

1. Suppose you have a web page you want to password protect, e.g. members_only.html.
1. Put this web page in its own sub-directory (e.g. /Library/WebServer/Documents/members) and be sure to update whatever links you had to it from other pages.
2. Create a text file called .htaccess in the members directory with the following content. You do know how to use vi, right? :)
   
• AuthName "Members Only"
• AuthType Basic
• AuthUserFile my_secretdir/.htpasswd
• require valid-user
3. Note that the AuthName will appear in the dialog box when the user is prompted for a username and password.
4. The .htpasswd file should be located in a directory which is not accessible by the public.
2. Now create the .htpasswd file as follows:
1. cd my_secretdir
2. htpasswd -c .htpasswd
3. htpasswd .htpasswd user1
4. You'll be prompted for the password for user1.
5. Multiple user names can be added to the .htpasswd file.
6. Be sure to set the protections on the my_secretdir and on the .htpasswd file to only allow access by the owner and the Apache server.
   
3. Turn on password authorization on your Apache web server as follows:
1. Locate the file httpd.conf which should be in /private/etc/httpd
2. Make a backup copy of this file and then edit it (you may need to sudo vi)
3. Locate the AllowOverride line which follows comments about the .htaccess file (should be the 2nd instance) and change None to All

Remember, always proceed with caution and heed my advice with a grain of salt!

Here is the final product - a mock-up of my HOA web-site and the dialog box requesting a username and password:

Having mastered some CSS with this little project, I then returned to building a Georeferencing Calculator web page. More on that (and JavaScript) on my next post!

Kit Carson Carousel and Over the Air HDTV

We spent a day in Burlington, Colorado on the Eastern plains near the Colorado / Kansas border. Burlington is the home of the Kit Carson Carousel - a fully restored carousel manufactured by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company in the early 1900s. In fact, this was the 6th carousel built by PTC and the only surviving menagerie built by them. (A menagerie carousel has animals besides horses). It is housed in its own 12-sided building and is operated during the summer for only 25 cents per ride. The carousel does not having jumping animals, but makes up for it by turning up the speed. You can also enjoy listening to the Wurlitzer Monster Military Band Organ both in person and on-line on their website. If you like historic carousels, this is a nice one to visit.

We also spent some time at the Old Town Museum in Burlington. To get there, we took a horse-pulled wagon from the Carousel to the Museum, courtesy of Verlin Garner of 2AM Ranch. He was quite a character! Jenny and Robert got to sit up front and Robert even got to drive the horses (Ginger and Buddy) for a ways!

The Old Town Museum contains both an indoor and outdoor area. Inside, there are a large number of ranching / farming artifacts as well as older vehicles and farming tools. Did you know that you could identify fence owners by the pattern / style of barbs in the barb wire? Some of the more interesting exhibits for me were the turn-of-the-century textile displays. There were looms, sewing machines, a lace-making display, and quite a few garments made at the time. Thank goodness we don't have to hand-make our own clothes anymore (unless we choose to, of course).

Outside are a large number of restored buildings containing displays of various types. Some of the more interesting buildings were the sod house (imagine living in that), a manor house, the general store, and the drug store. For my husband, the car-lover, he enjoyed the "Texaco" building as well. Did you know that the soda-fountains were first located within drug stores because drug stores sold carbonated water as part of their offerings?

We enjoyed our visit to Burlington and would certainly encourage a visit to the Carousel and the Old Town Museum if you like those sorts of things.

Over-the-Air HDTV

Here in the Denver area, the new HDTV broadcasting antenna on Lookout Mountain has been up and running now since late May. These broadcasts had been coming from a different antenna at a lower power for some time earlier, but we had not been able to receive those signals up until now. Of course, what I fail to mention is that the UHF antenna makes a big difference.

We purchased a Samsung DTBH260F HDTV Terrestrial Receiver last Christmas, hoping to get those free over-the-air signals. We also had a UHF antenna purchased on a whim. These two items, combined, failed to work. So we waited until the new high-power antenna was up and running. Again, the receiver / antenna combination just wasn't working. But on the advice of a good friend who really enjoys these sorts of things and a local Best Buy employee, we purchased a different antenna - a Terk HDTVa Indoor Amplified High-Definition Antenna. Lo-and-behold we now get a signal and more stations than we were getting with our old rabbit-ears! What a marvelous thing it is - modern technology!

Mind you, the antenna really needs to be pointing in the right direction, but if you know where Golden is compared to where you live, then you'll probably do just fine. And according to our friend, even those in Fort Collins can get the over-the-air signals using an outdoor UHF antenna. Amazing.

Horse Play

My daughter, Jenny, just finished a week of "Horse Play All Day" offered through the Boulder Valley School District's Lifelong Learning program. Her instructor, Kirsten Christensen, was excellent - knowledgeable and assertive with the kids. She really kept them focused and on-track. The kids were given basic instruction in the care and training of horses. They also learned how to do some rudimentary bare-back riding and leading. We also learned that Jenny is in fact highly allergic to dust and not so much to the horse itself, as we had previously thought! She is hoping to take this class again next summer.